Background on Development of this Identification Key
This page last modified on 23 February, 2005
The photos in this set initially included only wildflowers found at nature reserves and parks throughout San Diego County ranging from the coast to the Colorado Desert. In a few cases, I included species which grow as natives to San Diego County, but which I photographed further afield in California or nearby Arizona. My goal was and is to build a "Key" to help ordinary folks (i.e. people who are not specialists in Botany) to identify wildflower species they see in this region. Books published as field-guides tend to include only the 100 to 200 most frequently seen species. By the time I had photographed well over 200 species just in the coastal and foothill areas of San Diego County, I found that an alarming percentage of the species I found are not included in any of the field-guides. Though virtually all California wildflower species are described in the massive "The Jepson Manual" (recently supplemented by "The Jepson Desert Manual"), I found the Keys designed to identify the Family a plant belongs to nearly impossible to use. Only after I had found some other way to narrow down my search to a single Family (or even better the likely Genus within that Family), was I able to make sense of the Jepson descriptions of individual Species. Three other published resources (by Beauchamp, Reiser, and Simpson et. al.), and the CalFlora database ( see references below) have helped to determine whether a Species tentatively identified has been known to grow in the San Diego region. Hopefully the website of the San Diego County Plant Atlas project, now in its second year at the San Diego Natural History Museum's Botany Department, will soon provide us all with a much better way to obtain this information.
If you are not a Botany specialist, but are interested to know the identities of the wildflowers you see in Southern California, then I suggest that you test your skills with the following three examples. All three flowers are roughly the diameter of a U.S. penny coin. All three may be seen in reasonable quantities growing in frequently visited reserves. (Bonus question: which of the three is not native to North America ??).
Eventually I found a good example of a photo-based computer search Key for wildflowers on the CD-Rom "Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area" by Dianne Fristrom et al, which is available from the bookstore at the California Native Plant Society. (But most of the Species found on that CD-Rom are not native to the San Diego County region.) My initial identification Key on this website was an adaptation of the approach used on that CD-Rom. Unfortunately, I didn't really find that this approach helped me materially to find the family association of a wildflower I had never seen before.
In 2003, a naturalist friend with formal Botany training guided Lou and me on a wildflower search through one of the state parks overlooking the Napa Valley in Northern California. To identify the species we saw, he kept pulling out a well used copy of the Peterson Field Guides book "Pacific States Wildflowers" (T.F.Niehaus, 1976, Sponsored by National Audubon Society among others). That field-guide is an attempt to provide a binary search tree (of the type traditionally favored by professional botanists) using only the visual clues any hiker should be able to observe without special tools. After that visit, I tried to use the same book to resolve my identification problems with several dozen local species that I've photographed in the last several years. The book helped in a few cases, though my searches suffered because the illustrations are all line drawings, and the region covered is too large to permit covering many Species, Genera, or Families that are fairly common in the San Diego area. Also, it didn't help that in the last 30 years the professional Botany experts have been rearranging the Species and Genus assignments to Families, creating new Families, etc - in response to a lot of new information on how plants have evolved.
So I have been upgrading my Key in an attempt to apply the basic visual identification principles used in the Peterson Field-Guide, but using the computer as a tool to reduce the burden of flipping pages, and using my photographs to replace the line drawings. All of the Species are illustrated with thumbnail images collected on one browser page per Family (or sub-family for the larger families). Based on visual clues and brief lists of common visual characteristics, the links in the Key direct you to the Family where additional Species examples usually can be seen. Alas, I've found that various of the Families can be reached via several quite different paths based on visual clues - e.g. the number of petals, radial symmetry vs. bilateral shape, etc. That's an aspect not emphasized in the Peterson Field-Guide. So the Key should be looked on as a tool to help narrow your search for a few Families - hopefully those with photo illustrations of wildflowers reasonably similar to the examples you are trying to identify.
Except for a few notable Families, I have illustrated most Species with multiple photos - showing not only the closeup view but also leaves or other foliage, and the whole plant in most cases. As time permits, I'll be adding those photos for the remaining Families. Clicking the thumbnail photo of a Species on the Family page will jump directly to the first (usually closeup) large-format photo in the slideshow group for that Species. As time permits, Notes attached to the slideshow pages (display by clicking the link in the left-side column) will identify where and when each photo was taken, and indicate how I derived the identification. It has taken me many months to introduce the slideshow photos progressively, one Family of Species at a time. Until almost all of the Families have this detailed coverage, most of the Family thumbnail pages will continue to show (what looks like) a Notes button that does nothing when you click it. Eventually, those buttons will point to short notes commenting on experiences with identification of Species in each Family. You should check my Recent Changes List to see how far I've gotten in this progression.
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